new

New game arrivals in the next 3 months

The third installment in the Bioshock series is a first person shooter set in 1912. Players assume the role of former Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt on a rescue mission to save a young woman named Elizabeth. During their escape, Booker and Elizabeth form a powerful bond – together they fight their way through a storyline packed with twists and turns.

Defiance is a science-fiction MMO shooter from Trion Worlds. Players are enlisted as Ark Hunters to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area in search of advanced alien technology after a massive world-wide event led to the the fall of plant and animal species and the rise to new species. Futhermore, several alien species came to Earth which led to war, further devastating the planet.

This is a third-person action-adventure game, developed by Digital Extremes and co-published by Namco Bandai Games and Paramount Pictures. Players can assume either the role of Captain Kirk or Spock, the two characters are intended to show different gameplay techniques, with Kirk being the more typical shooter while Spock has stealth techniques – but each are armed with weapons to reflect their gameplay style.

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360Release: 26th April 2013

Grid 2

A racing video game developed by Codemasters, Grid 2 is the sequel to Race Driver: Grid. It includes real world locations such as Abu Dhabi, Paris and US states to name a few and lets you choose cars spanning four decades. Check out the trailer below, there are some seriously sexy rides going on.

Platforms: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360Release: 31st May 2013

February 18, 2013

MMORPG Update: Survarium rises from the ashes

I guess to be totally accurate this should be the MMORPG and MMOFPS update, but that’s just way too many letters for my liking! That said, Survarium is in fact an MMO first person shooter that has role-playing elements to it. I really wanted to write a short piece on this upcoming MMO as it’s literally risen from the ashes of GSC Game World (their most successful game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series) which unfortunately closed it’s doors in early 2012 – the team then went on to form a new company called Vostok Games and Survarium is their creation.

Survarium is partially set in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which ties in with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series somewhat, and like Diablo III the setting is going to emanate that feeling of darkness and veiled evil (day or night) setting the scene for some dramatic in-game events. The game is set in a future where a massive ecological catastrophe has decimated the planet and nature has turned against humanity, the woods encroach into the cities, crazed-animal attacks are commonplace and strange plants begin to spawn everywhere, this chain of events is described as an anomaly and scientists are powerless to help, countries collapse and the new game is survival. You need to survive when everything around you is in chaos, you need to find a role to fulfil in the new world and will need to complete tasks for the various camps in order to get things such as new types of weapons to aid you.

The game is going to feature a host of different modes including a F2P mode meaning that you can just jump right into the game and take a look around. In a lot of ways it really reminds me of Guild Wars 2 with the dynamic world events and the story for the entire world being driven by the actions of the players in-game, and I’m not knocking that at all because it works so well and is a great development in MMO gaming. Players will have to come together when they come into contact with anomalies in order to survive.

More information and future updates can be found on the Survarium website: http://survarium.com/en, including video posts from the developers, wallpapers and other visuals. There is also an informative development timeline which leads up to the beta release in the fourth quarter of 2013. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on over the coming months.

Six disturbing new chapters in the Left 4 Dead Series await you, time to team up and reload!

Back to School is a new and challenging Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 campaign available now and set against the backdrop of Borden city. Our four protagonists have heard that the US Military are planning to come in and clean up the city from the infection and have decided to go the the nearest stronghold, which just happens to be the local high school. The team start out from the north while the army starts from the south, in order to get to the high school they must fight their way through five additional brand new areas: The Forest; The Railway Station; The Town; The Cinema; and The Church, before finally arriving at the gates of the high school. Even though you have all these new locations it will still feel familiar, dark and menacing backdrops, zombies coming at you left, right and center and the all important team chatter.

Although the Back to School campaign was originally released for download on 28 October 2012, there were a few technical glitches which meant that it wasn’t ideal gameplay, in fact all the features of the new campaign weren’t actually in place. But with the latest release it looks like everything is finally in place and it’s a good time to download the campaign and give it a try. Be warned, I have read that the difficulty settings for the new campaign don’t entirely mesh with those of the base game, so just keep that in mind when you are turning the settings up to expert, this campaign is hard.

– Six absolutely new maps in both Versus and Campaign modes
– Twelve brand new Panic Event
– “Marauder” – new game mode
– New type of the final
– Non-linearity
– Dozens of new models and textures
– “Cinematic physics”
– New Color Correction and particles systems

Valve to Release New Steam PC

According to Valve’s Gabe Newell, a new kind of PC will be released next year which aims to compete with the living room console. These PCs will be designed to be connected to your TV and enable you to run steam to play all your game titles. The ‘Steam PC’ will not be as flexible and open-source as a normal PC due to it’s function in being a method of bridging the gap between playing games on a console and playing games on a PC, but Valve think that this is something that people will really want for their living rooms and will compete with other companies such as Sony with their next generation consoles. We are going to have to wait until next year for more details however, we’ll keep you posted as more news is released.

CD Projekt Red’s new ‘triple-A RPG’ game is Cyberpunk

Since being introduced to The Witcher (thanks thsoundman) I’ve definitely followed the progress of CD Projekt Red with interest. After the international success of this game, which is based on the books by Andrzej Sapkowski, the CD Projekt group changed it’s focus to game development – enter CD Projekt Red. It’s great to see that the development side of CD Projekt is growing and going from strength to strength, this year they became the official Polish distributor of games published by Codemasters, an award winning game developer and publisher with over 25 years of industry experience bringing titles such as DiRT, GRID, Cricket and Operation Flashpoint. The group has also formed several partnerships with companies such as Blizzard, Astragon, Sega, NCSoft West and Wizards of the Coast; important steps in the company’s development.

The latest game in development will be a ‘triple-A RPG’ based on the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper game by Mike Pondsmith, it’s development team will be made up from developers from The Witcher series alongside new staff brought in to support the project. There is not much known about this game, which was announced during the CD Projekt group’s summer conference, but it looks like it’s going to follow the same ‘mature’ RPG theme as The Witcher, which means violence, nudity and images and content of a sexual nature will all be in there (done really well I might add), and we can expect that it will follow the rules of a usual RPG game with customisable characters, classes, weapons etc. The game will be non-linear but story-driven, where magic, fantasy and lore is replaced by cybernetics, weapons and implants. Details from an online job posting show that CD Projekt Red are looking for a multiplayer programmer to work in their core development team confirming that future games will be featuring multiplayer modes. Although The Witcher is an amazing game players are limited to playing just Geralt of Rivia. This isn’t really a problem, but many RPG fans want to be able to choose their own character and in CyberPunk they will get that choice.

The cyberpunk scene has been done time and time again, but somehow I feel that CD Projekt Red are the right team to be taking this on and will be able to do it justice; judging by the reactions online to the news of this upcoming game it looks like I’m not the only one and there is genuine interest in what comes from the project team next. It also looks like they will be opening the door for a lot of new players with the news that The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition, already available for PC and Xbox 360, will soon also be coming to Mac later this year. Pure speculation at this point but perhaps they will aim to deliver future games to Mac also on release.

Honestly, there are not enough hours in the day for me to play The Witcher and The Witcher 2, two of the best games I’ve played this year for sure. If you haven’t played either of these it’s well worth picking up a copy, you won’t be disappointed.